Chapter 12
Sweden
“Go Jimmie go!”: The voices of Sweden Democrat supporters
The Sweden Democrats is a nationalist right-wing
populist party with roots in neo-Nazism and white supremacist beliefs. The
party has experienced continuous progress during the last decade in Sweden,
attracting 20.5 per cent of the vote in the general election of 2022. A
combination of discourse analytical methods is applied to study the comment
sections of the party’s official social media accounts during the EU
election 2019 in order to explore what topics are most engaging to the
supporters and what discursive strategies the supporters use to position
themselves in relation to politicians, to other parties or to political
topics. Particular attention is paid to the role of affirmative and
evaluative practices to build ingroup identity.
Article outline
- Introduction
- The Sweden Democrats
- Data collection and ethical considerations
- Affordances of the different social media channels
- Analytical framework
- Analysis and findings
- Most engaging topics
- Supporter positions
- 6.3Affective and evaluative practices
- Close analysis: Positioning, recontextualisation and identity
construction
- Concluding discussion
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Acknowledgements
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Notes
